Beyond Rubik's Cube Entryway

Role: Lead developer

The Beyond Rubik’s Cube Entryway is an interactive piece that serves as an immersive introduction to the Beyond Rubik’s Cube exhibition.

Projected on two adjacent entrance walls, a continuously varying visual system inspired by Rubik’s Cube is generated by our software. Progressing in an isometric grid from points, to lines, to planes, to cubes, these elements slowly flow towards the exhibition space, accompanying visitors as they walk in.

Utilizing depth data from three Microsoft Windows Kinects, the installation reacts to the presence of people by changing its color patterns. These reactive patterns are generated with a variety of signed distance functions mapped onto geometry surfaces.

To maintain a responsive and fluid experience, many smoothing tricks are employed: image processing on the depth data, moving average/1-euro filters on the blob tracking positions, kernel density estimation for smooth influence curves around the tracked positions, etc.

This installation also hosts a dynamic audio soundtrack where dots, colors and transition events each have a corresponding audio representation.